Mysoginy in Medicine

During their date at Yale medical school in chapter 6, Esther sees the birth of a baby happen, delivered by Buddy’s friend Will. He mutters, “You oughtn't to see this. You’ll never want to have a baby if you do. They oughtn’t to let women watch. It’ll be the end of the human race.” Interestingly, both Esther and Buddy laugh at Will’s side comment, which suggests that Esther really didn’t expect anything that she was about to see. As she sees Mrs. Tomolillo’s “spider-fat stomach and two little ugly spindly legs propped in the high stirrups”, her narration of the novel switches from nonchalantly appreciating the cadavers in the previous room to exuding the disgust that she must have felt during the baby’s birth. She, however, is not disgusted at the natural birthing process -- she is much more mortified at the fact that the woman was forced by male doctors to take drugs that made her enter “a kind of twilight sleep”, controlling her.

With her own eyes, Esther sees how a woman’s agency is stripped away from her as she can’t even process that she just birthed a child as a result of being drugged: Mrs. Tomolillo “didn’t answer or raise her head” when she was told that her child was a boy. She describes birth as this “long, blind, doorless, and windowless corridor of pain” that women are eager to enter again and again because the drugs allow them to forget how the male doctors slit their stomach open and controlled the occurrence of their own child coming into the world (65-67).

Esther notes later that she had always imagined childbirth as a deeply personal experience between mother and child, the first moments of interaction between two connected figures. As she is processing her realization that birth is yet another thing the patriarchy has taken over, Buddy excitedly asks her what she thought of it. This, I could tell, was a turning point in Esther’s perception of Buddy. Because he is totally encompassed in the world of medicine as a male, he is numb to Esther’s feelings about the mistreatment of women in the medical world. This leads her to associate him with this gender injustice, and he becomes a symbol of male cruelty in the medical world. As she continues to meet with male doctors throughout her own mental illness journey, this perception is perpetuated with reason: she thinks George Bakewell, hospital houseman, only wanted to see “what a girl who was crazy enough to kill herself looked like” (173), Doctor Gordon truly didn’t care about her wellbeing as a human as he didn’t remember any personal info about her and, not to mention, gave her an incorrectly-executed shock treatment, and Doctor Syphilis, who stood at her bed taking notes like she was a science experiment. This childbirth scene builds part of the foundation for Esther’s growing belief that men take advantage of women in every scenario: marriage, work, medicine, etc.

As a closing, I have a story: I spent a bit of time at Carle Hospital today interviewing my mentor for senior project class. She is a hospitalist, which means she visits a variety of patients as a medical doctor and cares for them closely while their primary departmental doctor is with other patients. I met her in the physician’s break room, where she sat me down so that we could begin our conversation. A man in a white lab coat, another doctor, was at the fridge nearby. As he pulled out a root beer, he asked my mentor if she was going to the research seminar later that day. When she politely told him she was unaware of this seminar happening, he looks at her and scoffs, saying, “You’re always organized and check your email constantly. Aren’t you supposed to be the one who knows these things?” As an extremely busy person, it was a blessing that she was able to spend an hour out of her time to allow me to interview her, and I was not surprised to hear her say that she simply was not able to fit that seminar into her schedule today. However, this made me so upset. The male doctor was quite obviously putting her down for not being aware of this event, even though she is so on top of everything in her life.

I guess I shared this story in this blog post because it made me realize that the degradation of women in the medical scenario is still prominent in 2019. I witnessed this double standard for women in medicine as they’re supposed to be both incredibly organized and on-task as well as be present in the public sphere promoting their work, while men can be accepted in the public sphere without planning simply because they look like a man with experience. This reminded me of the double standards in Plath’s novel, like when Buddy slept with that waitress and Esther felt an expectation that she wasn’t allowed to have affairs with other men because of Buddy. I feel you, Esther. Screw the patriarchy, sis -- thank you for your “radical” thinking of female justice.